(They can't identify me personally, but they can tell that the same person who was on FA is now on some other site, and they can build a profile based on sites visited.)
Is this a matter of they simple could if they wanted to, or that they actually do build a profile instead of just aggregate data (e.g. of the form: 5 people from FA went to this eBay link, 6 to this Amazon link, and not recording profiles like who went to both)? If it is just about the potential to record such things, that is true of pretty much any site, especially ones with ads.
Issues of whether FA should have done this and/or announce it aside, it seems like a lot of people suddenly claimed to have great issue with tracking and statistics technologies on the web. Yet they only seem to care about the FA case, never actually taking any precautions or do anything about the larger issue, as opposed, for example, to finding an extension as pointed out in the parent post here. If taking some of the hyperbole of such types seriously, you would think they would rip the network adapter right out of their computer if you showed them just what normal webservers log by default, let alone what data you can get if you actually tried to collect it via a website. FA might be making an effort, token or not, to play nice, but most of the web does not. So it seems some people demonstrate they don't really care about the issue at hand other beyond looking to seek out drama and something to complain about, and they drown out those that are more serious and consistently care about the actual issue. Hopefully, for a few at least, the drama will be a lesson in how the web works, instead of just a buttress to some petty opinion of the nature of furries.
Is this a matter of they simple could if they wanted to, or that they actually do build a profile instead of just aggregate data (e.g. of the form: 5 people from FA went to this eBay link, 6 to this Amazon link, and not recording profiles like who went to both)? If it is just about the potential to record such things, that is true of pretty much any site, especially ones with ads.
Issues of whether FA should have done this and/or announce it aside, it seems like a lot of people suddenly claimed to have great issue with tracking and statistics technologies on the web. Yet they only seem to care about the FA case, never actually taking any precautions or do anything about the larger issue, as opposed, for example, to finding an extension as pointed out in the parent post here. If taking some of the hyperbole of such types seriously, you would think they would rip the network adapter right out of their computer if you showed them just what normal webservers log by default, let alone what data you can get if you actually tried to collect it via a website. FA might be making an effort, token or not, to play nice, but most of the web does not. So it seems some people demonstrate they don't really care about the issue at hand other beyond looking to seek out drama and something to complain about, and they drown out those that are more serious and consistently care about the actual issue. Hopefully, for a few at least, the drama will be a lesson in how the web works, instead of just a buttress to some petty opinion of the nature of furries.